Philip Kendall - Getting started in Core War

Right, so now you know what Core War is, how do I go about creating a
warrior? The first thing that you'll need is a MARS simulator, MARS being the
environment under which Core War is run. By far the most popular simulator is
pMARS, which best obtained from the mirrors of the FTP site, either in
France
or the USA. DOS users
can get the precompiled executables as pmars08.zip, whilst Unix users
will want the source distribution, pmars08s.tar.gz. Win95 users are
best getting the version from Nándor Sieben's Home Page
which runs properly under that OS.

The thing which I found most helpful when starting was Steve Bailey's
'Guide for Beginners': this is available from Stormking. Read through this, and make
sure you understand it, as the concepts in here are fundamental to the game; A
newer introduction which looks very good is Ilmari Karonen's Beginners' Guide to
Redcode.

Once you've done all that, you've probably tried to code some warriors, but
they've been thrashed by everything - the solution here is 'Core Warrior' -
a newsletter about the game of Core War, and the first eight
contain some very helpful stuff on writing basic warriors; these are available
from Planar's Web Page.
For more reading, the rest of the Core Warriors are also a good idea:
see my Core Warrior Index for more
information.

After reading some of those, you should be able to create some
warriors which will hold their own (at least on the
Beginner's Hill).
For information on submitting your warriors to one of the on-going King
of the Hill (KotH) tournaments, check out the
FAQ.